Unfrosted movie review & film summary (2024)

But there's just enough reality to irritate history nerds that the filmmakers apparently don't care about offering even a wildly exaggerated or satirized account of compelling true stories of the Kellogg'sPost rivalry. Their vaudeville/satire approach might've worked had the movie been conceived and executed with the panache that, say, the Coen Brothers bring to all of their slapstick features ("The Hudsucker Proxy" seems to have been a partial influence, at least on the "madcap" sequences); or, for that matter, the mix of daffiness and melancholy that Greta Gerwig brought to "Barbie." Seinfeld plays a madeup person named Bob Cabana who works at the uppermost level of Kellogg's. Cabana reels in his old partneranother madeup character, NASA scientist Donna Stankowski (Melissa McCarthy)to help him perfect the PopTart. Jim Gaffigan plays Cabana's boss Edsel Kellogg III, a madeup member of the Kellogg family. Edsel is in lust with the boss of the competition, Marjorie Post (Amy Schumer). Post is a real historical personage the daughter of Post Cereal founder C.W. Post. She actually did run Post (the company was once called Postum) as well as the international conglomerate that it morphed into, General Foods. The movie doesn't care about that stuff, of course; I just mention it in case you wondered if that character was based on anyone real, and if so, whether she amounted to anything other than the shallow, conniving, pushy horndog portrayed by Schumer. I could build out the fake/real list of characters for several pages, but there would be no point. You can't tell from looking at "Unfrosted" why some characters were based on fact and others were invented. There's no discernible aesthetic, only an immaculate but anonymousseeming craft. In a sense, you could say "Unfrosted" is a very faithful adaptation, because the source is a Seinfeld standup routine on PopTarts, and Seinfeld never cares about anything he talks about in his comedy, which is aggressively, at times petulantly trivial. His immense wealth so insulates him from the real world that he can afford to be the most blas person alive, rising to passion only when griping to interviewers that comedy has become too woke.